Film Weekend

I went to see two new films this weekend as part of different film festivals (there is a festival for every occasion/nationality/good cause these days).

36, Quai Des Orfevres was part of the French Film Festival, which premiered on Friday night at the NFT, was billed as a stylish French crime/gangster thriller in the mould of Heat or Lock, Stock... It was certainly very stylishly filmed (in that the film could have been sponsored by Gauloise, everybody wore black leather coats, it rained all the time and the moody soundtrack was pasted on so thick that you had trouble hearing the dialogue) but was very thin on actual substance. It shocked for the sake of it and the plot meandered so much that by the end of the film (which could have finished several times over) I just didn't care which characters survived or not.

Which contrasts very nicely with In the Shadow of the Palms: Iraq, showing as part of the Australian Film Festival at the Barbican, in which I did care very much whether the protaganists survived. This is a documentary following various people before and 'after' the war. For the most part it conforms to type for this sort of thing but it had it's moments and really brings home the human angle of the conflict (there is one very distressing scene in which a mother holds her son who had just died on camera). What was most revealing was how people's outlooks on the war hadn't really shifted in their criticism of the Americans and British and how they have mis-handled the aftermath of the invasion ('so we have lost our leader' says one man, 'what have we gained?')